Is Your eBay Business Very Slow? – How to Fill the Gap

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. If you purchase items through my links I will earn a small commission (at no cost to you) that helps support this website. Thank you for your support!

When I started selling products on eBay, it was completely on a whim. We received some unwanted items from family members such as clothing, purses, and a few electronic items.

Everything sold quickly and we wanted to keep up the momentum so we began sourcing products from thrift stores. Eventually, we decided to sell men’s clothing, particularly golf clothing.

After several months, sales began to slow down even though we had good products listed. So what can you do when you find your eBay business very slow? I’ll explain one option that can help to fill the gap.

Possible Causes of a Slow eBay Sales

There could be a number of reasons why your eBay business is slowing down. The reasons below are what I feel happened to our eBay sales. However, they are highly possible and common reasons that anyone’s sales may begin to dwindle.

Products Out of Season

As mentioned earlier, we began to focus on selling men’s clothing, primarily golf clothes. Golf is a seasonal sport. Therefore, during the winter months sales didn’t do as well as in the spring and summer months.

eBay Algorithm

People have written about the eBay algorithm changes multiple times. I don’t know much about it myself except that when there are major updates, a lot of eBay sellers notice. Often times they find changes in where their listings rank and so on.

Not Enough Products Posted for Sale

We tried our best to scale up and list as many products as possible. However, it was difficult to find golf clothing that was marked down low enough to earn a good profit. Not having enough products listed definitely impacted our cash flow.

Too Much Competition

Competition impacted our sales as well. There is hardly an item that you can sell on eBay that someone else isn’t selling already. Even when we found golf clothing for a great deal, there would be a dozen other sellers with the same item. That meant having to reduce our prices to compete or run auctions in which you may barely get what you’re hoping for in price.

Fill the Sales Gap with Dropshipping

Dropshipping is a great fit for eBay sellers because it is an eCommerce business. If you can manage to sell on eBay, running your own dropshipping business won’t be much different.

What is Dropshipping?

The dropship model is an online business model in which you do not have to invest in any inventory.

What that means is that you don’t have to have huge start-up costs and you won’t have to tie up your cash into products that may or may not sell.

Instead, you find dropshipping suppliers (which is easy to do, I’ll explain below) and you can place the products that they sell into your own eCommerce store and set the prices to be what you want.

When a customer buys a product from your store, you pass along payment for the product and the customer’s shipping information to your supplier.

The dropshipping supplier then ships the product directly to your customer for you. Your profit is the difference price between what you charged for the product and what the dropshipping supplier charged you.

You can have your store custom built and all packages include a personal manager who will handle all of the details for you.

How is Dropshipping Different From Selling On eBay?

There are some key differences between selling on eBay and operating your own dropshipping store. Here are the things that stand out:

eBay Has It’s Own Customer Base

When you sell on eBay, you tap into eBay’s customer base and popularity. That makes it easy to find buyers for your products. With dropshipping, you market your store using paid ads, sharing on social media, and other marketing methods to find new customers.

Dropshipping is 100% Your Business

When you sell on eBay, they have the authority to close your account at any time for any reason. Dropshipping is your own business so you are not at the mercy of another company closing your account or affecting your sales based on algorithm updates, policy changes, etc.

Dropshipping Saves Money

Unlike eBay, you do not have to buy your inventory up front and you don’t have to pay listing fees or seller fees.

But Can’t You Dropship On eBay?

Sure, you can dropship on eBay but you are still going to deal with the same issues you are dealing with now:

Fierce competition

Listing fees, seller fees

Ranking issues with your listings

Besides that, many dropshipping suppliers also sell their products on eBay so you would find it extremely difficult to compete with pricing.

You have much more freedom with your own dropshipping business.

In Conclusion

Dropshipping is a great way to fill the gap when you find your eBay sales slowing down. You may even find it a better online business model than selling on eBay.

It definitely can’t hurt to pursue both options. You can learn more about getting your own dropshipping business below: